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Operationalizing accessibility in environmental sustainability efforts: Challenges, barriers, and opportunities
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Authors
Alicia Bevan,
Alexis Buettgen 
,
Manuel Riemer,
Brittany Spadafore ,
Hillary Scanlon,
Stephanie Whitney
Abstract
There is growing recognition of the need to move towards climate justice in response to the climate crisis; that is, ensuring mitigation and adaptation responses centre equity, and promote the inclusion of marginalized or otherwise ‘equity-deserving’ groups, including people with disabilities. Despite this recognition, there is little empirical research exploring the intersection of disability in sustainable developments, and even less addressing the practical challenges and opportunities to operationalize a sustainability-accessibility mindset within existing organizations. Drawing from a systems perspective and the human rights model of disability as well as an empirical case study, this paper explores practical challenges and considerations of integrating accessibility into environmental sustainability projects through a critical reflection of our own experiences implementing a tactile and visual information system for multi-stream waste disposal units in public spaces. This article presents an illustrative example of the challenges and barriers of bureaucracy, corporate structures, and the shift of mental models that need to be considered in the implementation of promoting the inclusion of visually impaired individuals. We argue for an intersectional approach to environmental sustainability that addresses these challenges and barriers, and that is compatible with the disability rights motto, “Nothing about us without us” and the need for inclusive design for collaborative impact.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.31223/X5ST3Z
Subjects
Environmental Studies
Keywords
disability, accessibility, inclusive design, systems theory, sustainability, Human Rights
Dates
Published: 2024-08-22 11:00
Last Updated: 2024-08-22 18:00
License
CC BY Attribution 4.0 International
Additional Metadata
Data Availability (Reason not available):
The quantitative data from both surveys are available in the Open Access database Borealis under https://doi.org/10.5683/SP3/X31WVR .
The sensitive qualitative data from the focus groups are not publicly available due to institutional restrictions on the sharing data that includes potentially identifying information and the confidentiality agreement with the focus group participants. The Wilfrid Laurier Research Ethics Board may be contacted with inquiries about those data at reb@wlu.ca.
Temporary note to the editorial staff: The DOI will work as soon as the data is through the full publication process. You can check the data currently with this temporary preview file, which will be inactivated as soon as the DOI is live:
https://borealisdata.ca/privateurl.xhtml?token=8fb39bfa-3423-44d4-ab62-9f0acd404a89
Conflict of interest statement:
One research partner and co-author, HS, was the founder and CEO of STIL Solutions, the social enterprise whose products were utilized in the research project discussed in this paper. Therefore, co-author HS had potential business and/or financial interest in this research and its potential outcomes. After the research concluded and at the time of writing this manuscript, STIL Solutions has closed down and the business is no longer operational. In addition, while HS was consulted on key aspects of the research, the Principal Investigator made all final research-related decisions. All data were independently analysed by the university-based research team and the manuscript was drafted by the university-based researchers. HS was provided the opportunity to provide feedback and editorial suggestions.
There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article.